Healthcare organizations should use data to evaluate payment plans and ensure patients' needs are met, according to Jason Kuo, product manager at Patientco, an Atlanta-based healthcare payments technology company.
Mr. Kuo shared the following tip with Becker's Hospital Review: "As patient responsibility for healthcare costs continues to rise, offering payment plans (either self-service or through a financial counselor) is a well-established convention that many healthcare organizations utilize in order to provide as much flexibility as possible to their patients. However, we've found that in many cases, once rules and term options are set, they are forgotten and rarely changed, especially on the self-service front.
A fixed sliding scale taped to the side of a financial counselor's desktop is outdated and ineffective. It's important to understand how your patient population is responding to the options that you've given them (whether it's payment plans or any other payment vector) and be able to effectively use that data to quickly adjust if necessary. We recommend utilizing a system that not only services your core revenue cycle needs but also continually monitors key metrics to automatically adjust and optimize itself to best fit the needs of your patient population."
Read more about patient payment methods here.
If you would like to share your RCM best practices, please email Kelly Gooch at kgooch@beckershealthcare.com to be featured in the "RCM tip of the day" series.
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